The best way to see "Dogville" is to know nothing about it, but to trust it and have faith that it will deliver. At 177 minutes, the film is slow to start -- or so it seems -- going along for nearly an hour before it even hints that it will be anything more than an innocuous parable. In fact, the groundwork is being set for a movie that's anything but innocuous, but instead is mischievous, singular and profound.

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So stop reading.

Still there? Then let's talk, but not too much about the story and nothing at all about the ending, but about the nature of "Dogville" as a film and an experience.

In all my years of moviegoing, I've never had a picture lose me so completely and then win me back so thoroughly as this one. After a half hour, I was tired of it. After nearly an hour, I was struggling to stay awake. And then the movie took a slight turn, and I revived, then became interested, then involved, then caught up emotionally and then, finally, awestruck. This is a seriously important film and a huge achievement.

Written and directed by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier ("Breaking the Waves," "Dancer in the Dark"), "Dogville" has lots to say about human nature in general and provincialism in particular. But the movie's special target is without question the United States. Beneath its surface of Scandinavian serenity, this is an angry film, not a concerned one, not a reproving one, but one that's boiling mad. Yet for all of von Trier's rage at us, his criticisms aren't scattershot. His observations are pointed and intelligent.

"Dogville" takes place in a small town in the Rocky Mountains during the nadir of the Great Depression, but there are no mountain vistas. The film is shot entirely on an empty soundstage, with chalk outlines standing in for houses, streets and trees. Throughout, the actors mime knocking on doors and opening them, and this fey conceit takes a few minutes of getting used to. But gradually the movie's barren look becomes an advantage. Von Trier is not interested in portraying the boundlessness of the environment but the characters' insularity and lack of imagination. Their world might as well be flat and surrounded by darkness. Von Trier makes that literal.

The denizens of Dogville are played by an international cast of famous names and faces -- Lauren Bacall and Harriet Andersson as shopkeepers, Ben Gazzara as a blind man, Blair Brown and Patricia Clarkson as housewives, Chloe Sevigny as the local heartthrob -- with John Hurt as an unseen British narrator, who sets each of the film's nine scenes in a voice dripping with false kindness. Paul Bettany has the pivotal role of Tom Edison Jr., not the son of the inventor but a sensitive young man who dreams of becoming a great writer.

One night gunshots are heard, and Grace (Nicole Kidman) enters, fleeing from gangsters. Tom hides her and persuades his fellow townspeople to let her stay. In return, she starts doing little chores for everyone, keeping to a regular schedule. She weeds for Ma Ginger (Bacall), helps Chuck (Stellan Skarsgard) with his trees, baby-sits for Vera (Clarkson) and keeps Old Mr. Mackay (Gazzara) company. Gradually, she makes herself indispensable.

But the town's enthusiasm for harboring Grace is diminished when the sheriff shows up one day with a wanted poster for Grace's arrest. Though she's wanted for a crime that everyone knows she couldn't have committed -- Grace was with them in Dogville at the time -- Mrs. Henson (Blair Brown) still wonders if they have a legal obligation to report her anyway. This is the film's first, faint dark turn. Others, darker, will follow.

Von Trier has never been to America, and for this he has been criticized. If he visited, he'd probably find a lot to like. Yet, though armed with only secondhand knowledge, he still portrays and elucidates a peculiarly American strain of human pathology. He shows people aligning themselves with authority in order to disguise their own vindictiveness, even from themselves. He shows poverty-stricken citizens identifying with wealth, not each other. Most tellingly, he shows people with absolute, unshakable faith in their own rectitude using that faith not as a springboard for good works but as a license to commit grossly immoral acts.

There's power in this -- not in the statement, not in the allegory, but just in the human terms of the story. Kidman's performance is affecting in its simplicity, a portrait in muted colors that conveys Grace's near-saintliness with an offhand air. She doesn't express outrage, and so we feel it. Bettany's challenge is different, to show us more of Tom than Tom sees in himself. And so we see the heroic impulse but also the small spirit, the true honest yearning of the unevolved soul.

Some have called "Dogville" a Christian allegory, but even if it is, symbols are easy. It's poetry that's hard. "Dogville" is poetry, as strident and passionate in its outrage as Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," and it may prove as lasting.